Vote for sanity

Welcome to this week's Reno News & Review.

Have you voted in the Biggest Little Best of Northern Nevada yet? I've been seeing the usual social media campaigns of some of my favorite people and businesses striving to humbly ask for votes to be declared the best. You guys have to help your friends out; sometimes the campaigning gets a little pathetic.

If I calculate correctly, we should be about halfway through. Voting ends on July 25 at 4 a.m., so if you're waiting for an opportune moment to get started, consider this a hint. We've already had more than 1,500 people vote, so when you consider the last-minute bump, we're running at about the usual clip. As always, we don't care what you do to get people to vote for you, but if we catch you using technological means to game our little popularity contest, we'll punish you.

+ + +

The last time I wrote, I talked about the internship that I was doing for my journalism master's. I optimistically hoped to work seven days a week for 16 hours a day. You might have thought I was kidding when I wrote that, and maybe I was, sort of. But spending a solid eight hours a day researching incidents where someone was killed by a law enforcement officer is some of the most soul-sucking, depressing work anyone can do. Fortunately, it's not that easy to get into therapy, and except for being a little edgy, I've pretty much normalized. I added in the neighborhood of 500 entries to the database, which meant I was going along at a little better than three entries an hour for the entire time. I've got around another 2,500 more incidents already logged to research, and I'm sorry to report that that's barely scraping the surface.

I have yet to figure out the crowdsourcing angle to this. Only about 10 percent of the total incidents have been input by strangers, but I think when I finally get that part sussed out, the database will fill up pretty quickly since I can fact-check research at about five times the rate I can do the research.